Two sides of the same coin?
New
research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity
on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules.
The
findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science.
"The
common saying that 'rules are meant to be broken' is at the root of both
creative performance and dishonest behavior," says lead researcher
Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. "Both creativity and
dishonesty, in fact, involve rule breaking."
In
the first experiment, for example, participants were presented with a series of
number matrices and were tasked with finding two numbers that added up to 10 in
each matrix. They were told they would be compensated based on the number of
matrices they had been able to solve and were asked to self-report the number
they got correct. This setup allowed participants to inflate their own
performance -- what they didn't know was that the researchers were able to
track their actual performance.
In
a subsequent and supposedly unrelated task, the participants were presented
with sets of three words (e.g., sore, shoulder, sweat) and were asked to come
up with a fourth word (e.g., cold) that was related to each word in the set.
The task, which taps a person's ability to identify words that are so-called
"remote associates," is commonly used to measure creative thinking.
Gino
and Wiltermuth found that almost 59% of the participants cheated by inflating
their performance on the matrices in the experiment.
And
cheating on the matrices seemed to be associated with a boost to creative
thinking -- cheaters figured out more of the remote associates than those who
didn't cheat.
Subsequent
experiments provided further evidence for a link between dishonesty and
creativity, revealing that participants showed higher levels of creative
thinking according to various measures after they had been induced to cheat on
an earlier task.
Additional
data suggest that cheating may encourage subsequent creativity by priming
participants to be less constrained by rules.
Previous
work has focused on the factors that might lead to unethical behavior. In
earlier research, Gino had found that encouraging out-of-the-box thinking can
lead people toward more dishonest decisions when confronted with an ethical
dilemma.
This
research, however, focuses on the consequences of dishonesty:
"We
turned the relationship upside down, in a sense," says Gino. "Our
research raises the possibility that one of the reasons why dishonesty seems so
widespread in today's society is that by acting dishonestly we become more
creative -- and this creativity may allow us to come up with original
justifications for our immoral behavior and make us likely to keep crossing
ethical boundaries."
Gino
and Wiltermuth are following up on these findings by investigating how people
respond when dishonesty and creativity are combined in the form of
"creative" cheating. Their initial findings suggest that people may
give cheaters a pass if they cheat in particularly creative ways.
Story Source:
The
above story is based on materials provided by Association for
Psychological Science. Note: Materials may be edited for
content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
F. Gino, S. S.
Wiltermuth. Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity. Psychological
Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1177/0956797614520714
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Association for Psychological Science. "Dishonesty and
creativity: Two sides of the same coin?." ScienceDaily, 20 February 2014.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220083336.htm>.